New facility hopes to get day laborers off the street

CENTER OF ATTENTIONDAY LABORERSWith a new facility opening, supporters renew efforts to get workers off the street

EDWARD HEGSTROM, Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Published
5:30 am CDT, Sunday, May 29, 2005

Maria del Carmen Yupe stood before a group of immigrant day laborers, one of the city's most disorganized labor forces, to tell them about the advantages of organization.

The men gather every morning on the East End streets around Sampson and Canal, where they form a rough and chaotic labor market, jostling for work from passing contractors. Neighbors sometimes complain of job seekers drinking.

Yupe wants the men to agree to move a few blocks south to a newly reopened day-labor center, where they will be able to seek work in a more orderly fashion.

"We want to create a model, a center where you can come to find work," she said at a recent meeting with about 20 workers. "We want to help you organize."

Yupe, a volunteer at the nearby Our Lady of Guadalupe church, makes it sound simple. But if she and the organizers behind the East End Worker Development Center manage to get their facility off the ground, leaders say, it will be one of the first day-labor sites in the city to actually work.

Despite annual funding from the city of at least $100,000, day-labor centers have had a troubled history in Houston.

Neighborhood opposition killed at least four proposed sites before they opened. The center that operated on Sampson was shut down last year after years of neglect.

And the one center now operating, the Oscar Romero site in southwest Houston near Bellaire and Hillcroft, fails to attract more than a few contractors a day.

Galvanized support

More than a decade ago, advocates persuaded officials to support day-labor centers with a plan to open several throughout the city. The centers were supposed to get workers off the street, which was seen as something that would benefit both them and the city.

"There were supposed to be three or four of them by now," said former City Councilman Felix Fraga. "And there aren't."

But the dismal record has become a sort of rallying cry for advocates pooling their resources behind the Sampson site, which is scheduled to hold a grand opening in June.

Some experts say it would be asking too much to expect the day-labor centers to completely solve the problem of workers gathering on corners.

The workers are so transient and there are so many sites across the city that it would be difficult to get all the workers off the street.

"There will always be some (contractors) who say, 'I don't want to go there,' " said Francisco Deras, operator of the East End Worker Development Center.

He said some contractors are just starting out and haven't filed for the proper business licenses, which means they are reluctant to register with a day-labor center.

One success story

With some contractors hesitant to enter the centers and some workers reluctant to submit to the system, side markets sometimes develop outside the labor centers, Deras said.

That means the centers, which are supposed to reduce the number of workers on the street, can sometimes bring more.

Advocates, however, point to one success story.

In the early 1990s, when the Gulfton neighborhood organization known as GANO-CARECEN opened the Oscar Romero site on a busy intersection along Westpark near U.S. 59, it worked well, Cantu and others said.

But the city eventually put that land to use as a recycling site, and the Oscar Romero center moved first to Chimney Rock and then to its new location, no longer on a major street.

Cantu concedes the site is too inconvenient for contractors and workers, so most workers continue to gather on the nearby corner of Bellaire and Hillcroft.

"They have faced a constant struggle in getting the day-laborers to come into the center," Cantu said.

But Cantu and others also cite management problems at GANO-CARECEN, which has gone through leadership changes.

Representatives of the group sometimes fail to appear at task-force strategy meetings.

"They haven't been able to find a good site (for the Oscar Romero center), and GANO has lost some of its charisma, for lack of a better word," said Bob Fleming, of Catholic Charities.

Besides the out-of-the-way location, the center struggles because the city does not do enough to stop the workers from gathering on the streets, which would encourage them to use the center.

"The problem is not with GANO-CARECEN," he said. "The problem is with the community."

But both GANO and the old center on Sampson continued to receive city funding over the years, even after some began to question their performance.

Records from the city controller's office indicate taxpayers spent nearly $165,000 supporting the day-labor sites run by nonprofits in 2003.

That includes $97,700 for the Oscar Romero center, $37,000 for the Sampson site that later closed and $30,000 toward a Northside Redevelopment Center-operated site in the Near Northside that never opened.